How old does Google think you are? Because, um, they might be wrong

Google thinks I’m a senior citizen. Based on the websites you visit and the stuff you search for, Google infers your interests, age and gender, in order to show you more relavent ads (digression: It does this, in part, by having partner websites place a cookie on your computer; more on that here). Anyway, head on over to Google’s Ad Preferences page, and you can see what Google has inferred about you. It’s often less than accurate; for example, Google believes that I am a male above the age of 65. They got the gender right, but overshot my age by roughly 40 years (I guess I have drastically out-of-date tastes). With Google’s recent decision to allow all of its services to share users’ info with one another, it’d be nice if they had some idea of who we actually are. Or perhaps it’s better to remain shrouded in mystery? — Seth @ SFB

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